Can Confucianism be regarded as a civil religion for East Asia? This book explores this question, bringing the insights of Robert Bellah to a consideration of various expressions of the contemporary Confucian revival. Bellah identified American civil religion as a religious dimension of life that can be found throughout US culture, but one without any formal institutional structure. Rather, this "civil" form of religion provides the ethical principles that command reverence and by which a nation judges itself. Extending Bellah's work, contributors from both the social sciences and the humanities conceive of East Asia's Confucian revival as a "habit of the heart," an underlying belief system that guides a society, and examine how Confucianism might function as a civil religion in China, Korea, and Japan. They discuss what aspects of Confucian tradition and thought are being embraced; some of the social movements, political factors, and opportunities connected with the revival of the tradition; and why Confucianism has not traveled much beyond East Asia. The late Robert Bellah's reflection on the possibility for a global civil religion concludes the volume.

Acknowledgments Introduction Sungmoon Kim and Philip J. Ivanhoe 1. Confucianism as Civil Religion Fenggang Yang 2. The Revival of Confucianism in the Sphere of Mores and the Reactivation of the Civil Religion Debate in China Sébastien Billioud 3. Inside the Revival of Confucianism in Mainland China: The Vicissitudes of Confucian Classics in Contemporary China as an Example Guoxiang Peng 4. The Politics of Confucianism in Contemporary China Anna Sun 5. Obstacles to Globalization of Confucianism Richard Madsen 6. Beyond a Disciplinary Society: Reimagining Confucian Democracy in South Korea Sungmoon Kim 7. The Experience of Village Leaders during the Saemaul Movement in the 1970s: Focusing on the Lives of the Male Leaders Do-Hyun Han 8. Contemporary Japanese Confucianism from a Genealogical Perspective Takahiro Nakajima 9. The Bildungsroman of the Heart: Thick Naturalism in Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution Yang Xiao 10. Can We Imagine a Global Civil Religion? Robert N. Bellah Contributors Index